


Busy Work

by Arazsya



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Archaeology, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 22:36:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17569223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Edward Keystone knows busy work when he sees it. He’s had a lot of practice recognising it, though what it usually comes down to isthe thing that he’s doing that no one else is.





	Busy Work

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the same 'verse as Polar Night - I'd rank the need to read that before this at about a 0.1? This is set just under six months before that, but I put my reason why excavations need a paladin in that one, assumed like the fool I am that I wouldn't be revisiting.

Edward Keystone knows busy work when he sees it. He’s had a lot of practice recognising it, though what it usually comes down to is _the thing that he’s doing that no one else is_ , especially if he doesn’t seem to require any supervision for it. His brothers learn history with their tutors, and Edward checks the gardens for rabbits. The novices discuss religious lore, and Edward sweeps the temple steps. The paladins of the Church of Apollo hunt evildoers, and Edward goes to guard an archaeological dig.

It was something to keep him occupied, while the adults attended to more important things, or so Friedrich had said, when he’d thought that Edward couldn’t hear him. To Edward, he’d said that there were many ways of serving Apollo and thwarting evil, and that not all of them involved seeking out the evil and hitting it repeatedly with a morningstar. Protecting their history, he’d called it. Except that apparently, what history needed protecting from was less thieves and members of the Cult of Hades, more improper storage techniques, untrained paladins, and, most of all, time.

So, he’d known what it was, when Tjelvar had finally taken pity on him on his second day of standing sentinel at the edge of the dig site, the wind off the sea cutting a chill into the back of his neck, explained that they were unlikely to be attacked, and handed him a bucket.

He’d been glad of it, at the time. It _felt_ productive, even if it was just sifting through the bags of excavated soil and washing the mud off the stones, in case the real archaeologists had missed anything. He doesn’t usually resent any of his tasks. He’s usually left alone to do them.

Instead, a shadow crosses his bucket for the fourth time that day, and he scrubs at his stone hard enough to send muddy water slopping over the rim onto his morningstar, where it sits on the far side, on the off-chance that any evil should present itself. The blemish sits for a moment, then swirls away in a shimmer of heat-haze.

“Ed,” says the owner of the shadow, a little louder than necessary, even for it to carry over the wind in his ears, and Edward can hear the smile in his voice even without bothering to look up. It’s an insulting smile, or, at least, it usually means he’s being insulted. He thinks. He can never quite work out how.

They keep coming over. Peering over his shoulder, snapping at him to be more gentle with the objects, though he’s already treating them like they’re sacred to Apollo. They don’t like him, or they don’t like that their dig has to have a paladin now, but there’s not much difference in that for Edward.

“Ed,” he says, when Edward doesn’t look up, mirth still bubbling in his voice like caramel on a stove. “ _Eddie_.”

Edward lifts his head, and for a moment his eyes focus on the view behind the archaeologist, instead of on his face. He prefers it – the deep blues and turquoises of the Mediterranean Sea are far more appealing than the man’s mocking features – but maybe the sooner he pays attention, the sooner it will be over.

He doesn’t remember the man’s name – Tjelvar had told him, when they had arrived, but Edward had forgotten. They had all made it obvious, even to him, that they didn’t want him there, eyes narrowing at his introduction, muttering to one another, a few of the bolder ones even knocking into him when they go past. He’d been too distracted – picking over the memory of Tjelvar’s resigned, polite greeting ( _Edward. Thank you for coming._ ), struggling to work out if he hated him too – to remember who any of them were.

“Found anything?” the man asks. It’s a question Edward’s been hearing a lot – he thinks maybe they’re supposed to come over and check on him from time to time, because he clearly can’t be relied upon to distinguish between interesting and non-interesting rocks – but everyone except Tjelvar asks it either like a child told to clean their room, or a joke where Edward’s never allowed to know the punch line.

“No,” Edward says. He gestures towards the cloth where the stones are drying, the loose edges of it beating against the ground, and pointedly leans over his bucket again. The archaeologist gives them a cursory glance, and then sidles off again, steps dragged this way and that by the wind, clearly deciding that there’s no further sport in Edward today. He’ll be back again tomorrow, probably with more questions about the Church, which will be a trap, but not one that Edward’s worked out how to avoid yet – it seems to be equally funny whether he answers or not.

It’s only until the end of the dig, he reminds himself, as he starts to wash again. Then he’ll go back to the Church, and Friedrich will sigh and find him something else harmless to do until someone else needs a paladin for their archaeology, and he probably won’t be lucky enough for it to be–

There’s a bold streak of blue showing through the clod he’s holding, almost the same shade as the sea, off in the distance where it meets the sky. He runs his brush gently over it, dislodging enough of the dirt to see that the blue thing is embedded in the mud around the rock, and not a part of it – he picks it carefully out, and deposits the stone back into his bucket with a satisfying splash.

He frowns at the thing left in his hand, a small blue oval that rolls in his palm, and then looks up, trying to see if Tjelvar is still on-site – he’s been coming and going a lot, trying to get everything ready for when the person who’s actually supposed to be running the dig arrives. He stares for a long moment, squinting against the glare of the sun off the sea, struggling to distinguish the figures in the trenches. One of them – not Tjelvar – turns her head just in time to meet his eyes, and he sees her lean in towards her neighbour – also not Tjelvar – mutter something to him, and then their shoulders both shake, like they’re laughing.

Edward looks back down into his bucket, watching the scum drift lazily over the surface, following the ripples from the stone, and wishes he could take the glance back. Maybe he should just forget it, put the blue thing out to dry with the rest of the objects, and mention it the next time someone comes over to see how he’s getting on.

Except, Tjelvar _had_ said to let him know the second he found anything that wasn’t a rock, and if it is a rock, it’s certainly not like the other rocks. It might be important. And if it isn’t, he’d rather have Tjelvar tell him that than any of the others. Would rather Tjelvar didn’t hear about it third or fourth hand, from people who’d use it as yet another check against him and his church and the whole idea of having paladins on excavations.

He straightens his back and tries to imagine that he’s wearing his armour, pictures it so hard that he can almost feel the familiar weight of it.

“Tjelvar!” he calls. A sudden lull in the wind means that it comes out louder than he’d intended, and too many academic faces turn snidely towards him. Edward holds his breath, and placidly meets their eyes, one by one, but none of them seem to be Tjelvar. He’s probably gone again, off to the nearest town to try and organise them some local aid for moving a few of the larger stones that he’d been complaining about. One of the others will come over to see what he wants, ask him enough sharp questions that even he’ll know he’s being made fun of, or they’ll just leave him standing there, wondering how long he should give it before he just folds back to his bucket.

“What is it?”

The voice comes from behind him. Edward’s grateful for the excuse to turn his back on the rest of them, though his hair is immediately blown into his eyes, and when he tries to brush it out with his knuckles, he can feel that he leaves a line of muck over his forehead.

Tjelvar looks tired. There are lines on his face that were never there when they’d been looking for Hannibal’s tomb, even after they’d encountered the snow leopard. They’re not even usually there when he’s outright frowning, a weary cast that Edward decides he doesn’t much like. He’s hunched, too, bowed in, and Edward hopes he won’t stick like that, like the few small, stunted trees that grow around the excavation site.

“I don’t think it’s a rock,” Edward announces, and proffers the blue thing. His hand is still covered in muddy water, staining the creases in his palm and dripping out between his fingers, and he wishes that he’d thought to transfer the blue thing to the other one, but it’s too late now, and it’s not as if it’s _that_ much better.

Tjelvar’s eyebrows quirk, but he takes the blue thing anyway, turning it in his fingers like it’s a puzzle piece, letting it leave trails of dirt against his skin. He angles it towards the light, inspecting it with the same care that he has everything the real archaeologists have turned up, and then he lets it fall flat against his palm.

Edward closes his hand, and wishes that he’d thought to wash the blue thing properly before he’d said anything. Not that Tjelvar seems at all bothered by it – this is what he does, Edward reasons, he’s got a lot of experience with mud – but maybe it would have been better manners.

“Do you know what this is?” Tjelvar asks, holding it out towards Edward again. There’s a brightness to his face now, and Edward hopes that it’s a good sign. He obediently bows his head to study it, reaches out and gives it a hesitant poke. It rolls slightly, revealing a hole through the middle of it.

“A bead?” he guesses, when staring at it for what feels like a full minute reveals nothing further.

“Yes!” Tjelvar declares, arm swooping to hold it up again, not seeming to notice that his hand is dripping. “A bead – probably from a necklace, the string would have decayed much more quickly. But it’s not just any bead – you see that colour? If I’m right, it’s Ancient Egyptian faience.”

Edward nods, because that feels like what he’s supposed to do, but Tjelvar’s eyes catch on the motion, and he seems to abruptly remember who he’s talking to.

“It’s a sort of ceramic,” he explains, and there’s not even a hint of condescension about it. “They made things out of it, like pots? This particular kind was mass-produced in Ancient Egypt, so its presence here could indicate trade far earlier than we previously had evidence for.”

“Is that good?” Edward hazards. He hates this new feeling, the one the others had made sure he’d been feeling ever since they’d arrived, the one that’s like trying to do delicate work in falconry gloves.

“It’s not really a matter of good or bad, it’s about expanding our understanding of…” Tjelvar trails off, his eyes moving from the bead to Edward, and he settles for a smile instead. He claps the hand not holding the bead onto Edward’s shoulder, and gives a light squeeze, leaving a smudge of dirt on the shirt that Edward knows he wouldn’t mind in a million years, because he can’t remember the last time anyone looked at him like that, a burst of sunlight in mid-December. “Well done, Edward.”

His hand stays there a few seconds longer, a warm, welcome weight, even as his attention transfers itself inexorably back to the bead, and Edward decides it’s just as well, because he can’t stop a slow, stupid grin from spreading across his face. Tjelvar - _Tjelvar!_ \- had told him _that_ , told _him_ that, and he hadn’t just said it, he’d _meant_ it.

“I’ll take this to show the others,” Tjelvar says, touch dropping away. “It’s a good find.”

The others. Edward’s face aches, trying to hold his own smile up, and just for a moment, he lets himself miss the Alps and Albertville, the snow-hush of the mountains.

“They’ll want to see it,” Tjelvar is saying, fingers closed around the bead, holding it down by his side. “But after that, why don’t I show you how to store the artefacts properly? Get you out of this wind for a bit.”

“I – I’d like that,” Edward manages, and struggles not to regret it immediately, unwilling to lose that approving glimmer to his own future incompetence. Tjelvar’s worked with him before, he knows what kind of student Edward’s likely to be, and he’d still offered. But maybe he’d only been being polite, and expected to be refused.

Tjelvar’s smile only broadens. He touches Edward’s shoulder again, more gently this time, a momentary farewell, before he turns, and starts towards the main trench. Edward looks after him for a long moment, then goes back to his bucket, content to wait for him to return. He finds himself humming, and the sound of it fills his head, drowning out everything except the distant recognition, somewhere at the back of his skull, that he’s done for.


End file.
